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The Diaries

One year & four days in -- Love conjures all

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Good wet Wednesday morning to all of you. I hope you are dry and warm wherever you, or singing in the cool November rain.

Days like today feel so much like Seattle or, in my case, Vancouver, where I spent several pleasant weeks before my life took its hard turn. I visited Vancouver three times in the two years before the raid on my farm, the first two to meet with medical cannabis experts there to get their advice on the best cannabis strains that would be most beneficial to folks in need back home and the third time to (briefly) consider a run across the border. On that last trip, I took my two best unrelated friends, Bill and Karen, for a week’s tour of British Columbia. I had already scoped out two properties, one the beautiful cabin on 400 acres near Hope (BC) that I have written all of you about before. The second property was on Vancouver Island – a functioning pick-your-own blueberry farm on five acres, with an exquisite arts-and-crafts period house, two barns and several out-buildings, a customer base of over 1,000, and a young couple eager to sell. As with the other land, I could have walked into a functioning business, which would have been all I would have needed to move to the front of the line for Canadian citizenship. But, as I’ve said before, I had no desire to live my life constantly looking over my shoulder, away from friends and family, surrounded by silence and beauty, but more alone than I ever was on my Tennessee hollow home. And so I passed on the prospect of following that outlaw trail. To find myself here, counting the time with all of you.

I think Karen and Bill knew what I was thinking – mulling over the options continually – and they were there to help in any way they could. Just spending that much time with two kind, bright, loving people whose introduction to each other in the misty mountains and ocean views of British Columbia, was the only gift I could offer to them -- the best gift of time well spent, together. The first night in Vancouver (at the Sativa Sisters Kind Sanctuary, a cannabis-friendly bed-and-breakfast on the west side of the city), I rented two rooms for the three of us, with Bill and I sharing and Karen to herself. But my constant tossing-and-turning (most likely from the fibromyalgia but perhaps also from the fear) had kept Bill awake. And so for the rest of the trip, Bill and Karen shared a room and I slept alone, which was fine with all of us. Sometimes, they would be in an adjoining room, and I could hear them talking into the night, giggling like young friends at a slumber party. Karen’s muffled laughter at those times was like a late fall rain on a tin roof, lulling me to sleep. Her smile shines through any contact with her now, be it email, a rare phone call or an ever rarer face-to-face dinner at her favorite Mexican restaurant in Santa Fe. Even now, I can see her smile, and her bright eyes. While I am in the “house”, she has been sharing stories of her son, Max, in his sophomore year in college in California, balancing a double major with a budding career as a race car driver, climbing the ranks in all his classes steadily, as we would all expect him to do. Ah, the joys of parenthood, something I can only guess at from a distance. But with Karen (and with my brothers and sisters, and with friends like Bill and Debbie, and Jonellie, and many others), even the faint reflection I feel of their soulful pride and happiness warms this growing older bachelor’s heart.

Even now, several years later, Bill still asks about Karen, and she him, though their only time together was as my guardians on that tentative Canadian road traveled one last time and then abandoned. They live worlds apart, her in the dry, sage-scented mountains of northern New Mexico, him in a moist, magnolia-fragrant mansion of northern Mississippi. Two accidental gifts that just keep on giving. I met Bill on the steambath-hot football practice fields of Columbus, MS in 1964, when I had left my mother, brothers and sisters to live alone with my father, wanting a more normal life, one that included a chance (finally) to be an athlete as well as a scholar. We had hit it off right away, and have stayed friends ever since. When Bill wrote me recently to ask what possessions of his I might want to have left to me in his will, the only thing I could think to ask for were any pictures he might leave behind of the two of us. Whatever background might be found in those pictures, whether it be northern Mississippi prairie, south Texas college town, Nashville and my little piece of its countryside, or Canada not quite on the run, the memories would be all the gift I would, could ever want.

Karen and I also met accidentally some sixteen years ago, naked in a large public hot tub at 10,000 Waves (our favorite spa), soaking the late afternoon away on the mountain outside Santa Fe, talking about whatever came to mind, laughing and joking with whomever else shared the tub with us that day. But the knowledge that this particular stranger was someone well worth getting to know better prompted me to leave a note for her at the main desk, asking whether we might spend some more time together sometime soon, with our clothes on. That was just the right thing to say, and so we did spend more time together, enough time to build an affection that has kept each of us there, for the other, whenever time and travels allow, and moments intertwine. Much water has flowed under both of our bridges since then, even in the high desert land of my second home. But we still care, about and for each other, and so those bridges still help us ford any distance between us, in time and space.

It’s nice to have lived the life I have, to have been blessed with friends like Bill and Karen, friends like all of you. Just in the past month, I have been blessed with letters from two of my favorite nieces and nephews, Katherine (Cactus) and Ben, just checking in with me from their respective colleges to tell me they love and miss me. Cactus turning 21 and still pondering what to do with her life, Ben pitching well enough at his community college to find himself being recruited to play “at the next level”. Both of them absolutely handsome and loving young people, who call me their (favorite) Uncle Bernie. Both with fond memories of my farm, coming there at least once a year, in the fall to help me sell berry jam, honey, Indian corn and decorative gourds at a big craft fair at Meriwether Lewis park on the Natchez Trace. Shucking corn until they could do it in their sleep (and did), getting up early to take the foggy drive from the farm to our impressive and colorful booth (four tee-pees of Indian corn, wooden baskets of gourds, an ancient wooden table covered with jars of jam and bright, clear honey), all dressed in overalls, so picturesque that all my young relations (Cactus and Ben and Daniel and Elizabeth and Meagan and Kerry) are captured forever in the pictures of many middle Tennesseans, out for an enjoyable autumn drive and drawn to the sight. Of us, surrounded by fall bounty, sitting on hay bales and shucking corn. And then to drive back to the farm, making a game of counting the deer in the shadows along the Trace, one point for does, five points for bucks. Making the time pass in a more exciting, inclusive, sharing way.

Now all those young relations have gotten older, Meagan teaching first grade, Daniel in his first year of law school, Kerry working hard to be a good nurse and the best mother she can be for my little sweet pea Grace, Ben and Cactus in college, Elizabeth in high school when she’s not winning equestrian competitions on her large and beautiful, stately and steady horse. Somewhere, I have pictures of them all, in those kaleidoscopic days of early autumn, when all of us were more innocent (me certainly, certifiably so).

The rains have stopped here, maybe only for a minute, so my sharing these memories with all of you will have to cease, at least for a while. With all I have to be thankful for, my past life can fill up any space where I find myself at present, even as that present life is filled with ever-changing dorm-mates, some good people, some never-to-grow-up spoiled brats. (One of my dorm-mates, arguing loudly with his counselor and the “house” director last week over something small, blurted out, “Don’t you know you’re dealing with a 10 year old here”, speaking of himself, even though he is a hillbilly grandfather who spent his last year in prison in the “hole” for a similar outburst of self-centered folly and fear.) Still finding much to be thankful for at the “house”, even if it’s the thanks for not being him. Though he does get to go home in two weeks, while I remain.

When I can’t sleep, many nights in the house, I can pull another one of you off the shelf -- my friends and family; my lovers and near-lovers; my fellow fighters for the country we know is still there, awakening from its own fog; my friends of another Bill, feeling (and sharing) our freedoms and our surrenders, passing it on. With the life I’ve lived and the many kinds of love (of, with and for all of you) I have been allowed to develop, these sleepless nights are never spent alone.

Because my love for all of you (and the love you all have given me) conjures all.
And keeps me free, until I am, once again.
Now it is time to get my hands in the wet earth, to plant tulips and daffodils, around the Vancouver rainstorms that have come to visit us here in middle Tennessee.
And to think of the here and now, until I hear from each of you again.
Stay warm, keep dry. Unless, that is, you’d rather be cool and wet. It’s all good, in its place.

Postscript: Two weeks ago, I was granted permission by the “house” to attend two of the preview screenings of “Eternal Vigilance: The Fight To Save Our Elections”, for which I will be eternally grateful. This documentary is so timely, and so powerful, in its weaving of the multi-layered story of the threats which our democracy faces now, and what all of us can do to save it. If you have not done so already, go to , view the five clips there and then order a copy (or ten) of the film. It will introduce you to a number of important people for the future of our country, and give you a glimpse of the work I helped do just before I entered the “house”. If I do nothing else with my life, I am proud and humbled by that work and by the new friends I have made by joining in the fight for election protection and voting integrity. Thanks to those two nights of freedom to attend the film’s previews, my memories of some of you are even fresher and more colorful. The film is so powerful that Jonell’s eleven year old son, Kenan, cried for his country on viewing it with us. That was a gift, being reminded that other strong and country-loving young-uns are coming up right behind us, to keep on fighting so we cannot lose. As was the gift of carrying Jonell’s younger son to the car, asleep on my shoulder, light in my arms.

More to be thankful for, one year and four days in, one day at a time. Until next time, stay safe. Enjoy your Thanksgiving, wherever you are. As for me, I will be allowed “out” for twelve hours on that day, and I will go home. To pet the dogs, to pull weeds in the garden, to sweat in the sauna, and to sleep in my bed. Alone, but giving thanks. For another day, and for living it, at peace.

My thoughts go out to all of you. Love conjures all.

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